I was sitting in the window seat of a plane about to take off from New Orleans for a connecting flight in Atlanta. The cabin was sultry, and although the little air nozzle above my head was rotated to its maximum aperture, it wasn’t doing much to stir the stifling air or freshen the pervasive scent of jet fuel.

To top it off, we were a good half hour or more past our intended departure time, and it looked like I might miss my connecting flight in Atlanta.

That’s when the plane started taxying slowly and the pilot began speaking over the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. I wanted to apologize for the delay, but we’re gonna make up the difference in flight. We’ve been given clearance for take off, and, to quote the great Ricky Bobby, ‘I’m gonna fly it like I stole it.’”

There may have been a “Yee-ha” at the end. It’s also possible the “yee-ha” was just implied.

Either way, when your pilot quotes Ricky Bobby and then promises to cut half an hour off an already short flight, you double check your seatbelt and the location of the emergency exit.

Now, as my family and I prepare for an upcoming flight out west, I find myself looking back at a lot of my experiences in the friendly skies and marvelling at the fact that my 12-year-old daughter is about to fly for the fourth round-trip in her life, while, by contrast, I didn’t step foot on my first airplane until I was 21.

Back then, a couple of other English majors from my college and I had been selected to present papers to the national conference for the International English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta. (Yes, the greek letters translate as STD, and the t-shirts available at the conference were a hoot). We would be flying from Nashville to Albuquerque, where I hoped, in addition to the conference, I’d get to see the legendary spot where Bugs Bunny missed his left turn.

I was flying in the company of two female classmates as well as two professors: the chair of my college’s English department and my faculty advisor, who also happened to be the Sigma Tau Delta chapter sponsor. I didn’t want to lose face around any of them, so I didn’t let on any of my apprehensions, even when I put on my headphones to immediately hear Alanis Morisette wailing about a poor dude plummeting to his implied death in a not-as-ironic-as-Alanis-thought plane crash.

My first experience with turbulence was more or less okay, even if I may have resembled William Shatner in the famous “Terror at 20,000 Feet” episode of The Twilight Zone. But what really threw me for a loop on that trip was the way the air pressure popped my ears so completely that I was totally deaf when we landed for a connection in Dallas — and I stayed that way until I woke up the next morning.

Belatedly, I learned about tricks like yawning and chewing gum before the return flight. My traveling companions swear they tried to tell me in Dallas, but I couldn’t hear them.

The next time I flew was 2003. It was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, and a game company in Baltimore was paying to fly me out for a job interview. It was to be a one-day round trip, starting with a very early morning flight out of Evansville. I was in an odd state of mind, because my work shift meant I didn’t get any sleep before setting off.

Everything went pretty well, and the flight itself was borderline perfect, with the exception of a brief layover in Detroit where I experienced a smell in the men’s room that permanently etched itself into my memory. The mix of tropical-smelling air freshener with whatever else was going on in there could be weaponized if it fell into the wrong hands. I thought this was my own, one-time observation, until a friend gave me a recording of a Barenaked Ladies concert he had attended in Lexington, at which a member of the band made a frighteningly similar observation while on stage.

Look, if a Canadian pop singer and I make the same observation, you can take it as gospel. The bathrooms at the Detroit airport are funky. And not in a Motown way.

Over the ensuing years, I’d travel often enough for work that flying became somewhat old hat for me. The one notable exception was that trip to New Orleans, which also offered my first and hopefully last experience sitting in the back of the plane.

I swear I bobbled like I was in a bouncy castle for the entire duration of the flight, and I was convinced the aircraft was going to tear itself apart. It wasn’t until I conferred with my seasoned traveler co-workers upon landing that I was made aware of the remarkably different experiences possible based on a passenger’s location in the jetliner.

I think one of the reasons my kids have such a nonplussed attitude about altitude is that I was able to impart these pearls of wisdom before they ever set foot on a plane. For our upcoming trip, we’ll have gum, and tablets for watching movies or playing games, and books both digital and analog.

And we won’t be in any special hurry. So, hopefully, if we have another pilot who likes to reference movies, he’ll follow Han Solo’s advice from Return of the Jedi and “fly casual.”

When it comes to picking your seat on the plane, you may have your own preference, but the experts say there’s actually such a thing as the best seat on a flight. Buzz60's Sean Dowling has more.
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